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Born to flying glass
bombs strafing shrapnel murder
from me expect no pleasing tones
no obscurities
reared in the light of the fires
gorging themselves on human flesh
my mind was clarified
Keith Barnes
How have the changing politics of national
memory in Britain and Germany since 1945 shaped the life stories
of those who were 'born to flying glass' in the Blitzes of London,
Hamburg and Dresden ?
In this seminar I am going to try and describe
some of my starting points for an oral history project that treats
the Blitz as the ground zero of representation for considering changing
regimes of war, memory, childhood, and the body politic over the
last half century. Does Walter Benjamin's catastrophe theory of
history, and his personal refusal to mourn, provide us with a still
topical map for wandering through the ruins of childhoods devastated
by war? Or does Freud's insistence on a break, or interval, between
the bodily experience of terror and its re-tracing in the symptoms
of trauma offer us a better model for understanding the living of
stories which oscillate between the foreclosing of events and their
chronic re-enactment? Does the promotion of children onto the front
line and the front page help or hinder the working through of childhood
memories of war ? And what happens to the image of the body politic
as a protective mother or fatherland when everything that was once
solid about its territorial defence systems melts down in the face
of surprise attacks from the air?
In this talk I will introduce some of the
material I have found useful in struggling with some of these larger
questions thrown up by the nature of my enquiry. I will show some
slides of photographs taken in the Blitz and other civilian war
zones, and read some extracts from poems, novels, memoirs and other
writing that have helped me get my bearings.
In this talk I will :
- Address some general questions of theory
and method raised by the research .
- Read through a brief anthology of texts,
extracts from some prose and poems, and some written and spoken
testimony that I have found useful in helping me get my bearings.
- Show and discuss some photographs which
were important in establishing the public iconography of the blitz
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